Musings on Fascism and the American Right: The Radiant Future as a Return to Eden

 

Historically speaking fascism, like European conservatism, was, on one level, a movement that looked to the past. It saw aspects of the past as a golden age. For the Nazi strain of fascism that glorious past lay in the mediaeval era (the Hitler as chivalrous Teutonic knight in Nazi iconography). It was thus no accident that Wagner, who likewise romanticised aspects of the past, was Hitler's favourite composer. It was no accident that Hitler's artistic and architectural vision was romantic rather than avant-garde. It was no accident that Nazism was a product, in part, of mediaeval Christian anti-Semitism. Mussolini's Italian fascism, on the other hand, was grounded in a romantic vision of the Roman imperial past.

While Nazism looked to a golden past it also looked forward to a radiant future, a golden future that saw the future through the prism of its ideology of a golden past. Nazism was grounded in nineteenth century nationalist blood and soil ideologies, blood and soil ideologies that, as Christianity had done in the past, categorised the Jews as other. It spliced scientific racist ideologies into this blood and soil nationalism and into the Christian anti-Semitism that undergirded it to produce a virulently nationalist and nativist corporatism. Nazis believed that if only they could eliminate the disabled, the decadent, socialists, communists, homosexuals, Roma, and, of course, Jews from their midst, then Germany and Germans could and would achieve their utopian national destiny, a utopian destiny that was tied to lebensraum and empire, the Nazi Eden. 

The fascism that developed in Germany out of this mix of golden past and radiant future ideologies was, as I noted, nationalist and ethnocentric. Nazis wanted to cleanse the German nation-state of Jews, the disabled, Roma, socialists, and communists, all of whom they regarded as enemies of the German state and threats to German racial purity. It is this populist Nazi hyper nationalism and hyper ethnocentrism that ties German fascism to the contemporary American populist right wing. The contemporary American populist right, like German fascism, is nationalist, ethnocentric, xenophobic, backward looking (their notion of America is a nostalgic one) and racist (their image of America is a WASPish and modified White image of America). Both also tie this heroic and pure past to a glorious future. Just as the Nazis believed that what was needed to restore Germany to greatness, to make Germany great again after the horrors of post-World War I Weimar, was to revive the heroic Germany of the past and cleanse the German nation-state of its impure foreign elements in the present, the American populist right believes that in order to make America great again they need to return America to its glorious WASP past so that America can achieve its glorious and heroic future destiny. So, although contemporary right wing intellectuals want to tar socialism with the dreaded fascist label, assuming that it will help them in their holy crusade against "unpatriots" in their midst, it is the populist American right rather than American liberals or socialists that the black shoe of fascism really fits.